Online information source for semiconductor professionals

Product Briefing Outline: KLA- Tencor has launched its fifth-generation broadband UV/visible brightfield inspection system. The 2367 is claimed to deliver increased sensitivity and a 2x faster data rate to help chipmakers sample more frequently and capture critical layer defects earlier. The system is designed to work with KLA-Tencor's 2800 Series full-spectrum DUV/UV/visible brightfield inspection platform, the 2367 enables a mix-and-match inspection strategy that is claimed to provide the lowest overall cost of inspection for next-generation IC manufacturing. According to the company the 2367 is running in production at several 90-nm and 65-nm fabs worldwide. Read more >>

Outline: Aprio Technologies has launched Halo-iOPC, the company's first product with features intended for both the design and manufacturing communities. Halo-iOPC, a superset of Aprio's optical proximity correction (OPC) product, is the first of its second-phase products that begin to enable better collaboration between design and manufacturing. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: KLA-Tencor has unveiled the Viper 2435 automated dispositioning system. The Viper 2435 is designed to capture the broadest range of critical defects while filtering out nuisance, enabling it to deliver quick go/no-go indicators that allow chipmakers to take corrective action before excursions become costly yield problems. Designed to provide high dispositioning accuracy at high throughput, the company claims a 67 percent lower cost of ownership than manual inspection alternatives. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: KLA-Tencor has launched its next-generation photomask inspection system, STARlight-2TM. The system is claimed to be the most cost-effective contamination inspection solution in the industry for all types of photomasks, including mainstream extreme resolution enhancement technique (XRET) photomasks, at the 65nm node and below. According to KLA-Tencor the use of a revolutionary image processing technology is at the heart of the systems performance. The system has been designed for the detection of progressive defects--an increasingly critical class of yield killers that impact device yield over time and can cause catastrophic device reliability problems. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: Invarium, Inc has unveiled "DimensionPPC," which it claims to be the industry's first unified, full-chip Process and Proximity Compensation (PPC) product for patterning integrated circuit (IC) layouts at 65 nm and below. Architected from the ground up as a new-generation layout-to-mask solution, DimensionPPC is intended to overcome the deficiencies of today's RET/OPC tools and layout correction techniques for other process effects, from mask through etch. The product has been fab-validated at 65nm during the fourth quarter of 2005. The technology is currently in production deployment at one customer site and is being qualified for production use by five additional leading semiconductor manufacturers. Read more >>

Product Briefing Outline: KLA-Tencor has launched its latest-generation optical CD metrology system, the SpectraCD-XT, which provides inline CD and profile measurements of critical device structures that help enable early prediction of IC performance and yield at the 90-nm and 65-nm nodes. The only high-performance spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE)-based CD metrology tool with sub-two-second move-acquire-measure (MAM) time, SpectraCD-XT provides a two-fold increase in throughput (to more than 100 wph) compared to the previous-generation platform at comparable performance, according to the company. Read more >>